1. Technical Field
The techniques described herein relate to dimensionally tolerant high-frequency, multiband conformal antenna arrays and a process for constructing such antenna arrays.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Modern combat vehicles, including air vehicles, water vehicles, and land vehicles, may utilize a wide variety of communications and electronic surveillance technologies. In the past, each different technology required a separate antenna, resulting in upwards of twenty antennas per vehicle. As technology progresses, new antennas may need to be installed, which requires retrofitting the new antennas onto vehicles that were not designed with the additional antennas in mind. This may become problematic, especially in air vehicles such as unmanned air vehicles and helicopters, where the additional weight and drag from the retrofitted antennas may significantly affect aircraft range, speeds and maneuverability. Further, the addition of, for example, blade antennas to the belly of the fuselage of an aircraft risk being damaged if the aircraft that may land on uneven surfaces.
Additionally, each antenna on a vehicle may operate in a different frequency range. Antennas that receive low frequency radio frequency (RF) signals, such as HF, VHF and UHF, are large in size because antenna performance is significantly degraded if the antenna size is not at least a quarter the size of the wavelength of the radiation. For this reason, low frequency RF antennas may range from 1-20 feet in size. Such large antennas are difficult to incorporate into combat vehicles for many of the same reasons listed above. Further, large antennas that are constructed using rigid materials are more susceptible to damage than smaller antennas made from the same material.